Hi folks, I've been doing a bit of thinking, and thought I'd share. At the moment, business ventures have followed this basic pattern: A producer collects a good, either from a farm on their residence, or by mining, hunting or otherwise collecting from the Wild or Wastelands. The producer returns to Town and sells the goods, usually on their residence with shop chests, through an arrangement on the forums, an auction, or by selling to another user's shop or mall. The producer uses the profits to purchase tools like enchanted gear, enhancements for their farm, or perhaps a labourer to assist, to further increase their profits. The process is highly labour-intensive; business expansion relies on the producer continuing to mine, farm, hunt, or collect. If the producer is inactive, the business grinds to a halt. I term this a 'labour enterprise'. I'd like to introduce a new idea: the Capital Enterprise. A capital enterprise would consist of a user setting up a facility where: raw materials are purchased, both through shop chests and privately the materials are piped down through Hoppers to furnaces or brewers the manufactured materials are piped down through hoppers to shop chests and storage for selling Such activities are capital-intensive; while they may require a lot of investment and work to construct the facility described, they require very little continuous work after that, a producer need only change prices regularly and do limited promotional work to continue making a profit. Capital enterprises could be used to make anything which can be brewed or smelted, and could be a significant improvement upon current manually operated systems. I'd like to see the impact of a capital enterprise being set up, potentially in the form of a residence-sized factory-like facility specialised in producing a single good, such as Smooth Stone. Cobble and Lava would be bought at the top, and Smooth Stone would be sold at the bottom, and there would be hoppers and furnaces and stuff in between. The idea would effectively allow a rich player to set up a huge factory, and make mass amounts of money with little promotion and price changing, even being able to construct multiple factories by buying supporter vouchers and effectively holding a monopoly on many goods, as nobody else would be able to produce goods as cheaply. EMC may not be an economy server, so it isn't able to create economic conditions (limiting land and protection powers, etc.) but this would still be an interesting experiment to see what would happen if wealth became more concentrated in the hands of an elite due to capital accumulation. Thoughts? Anyone interested in setting up their own capital enterprise?
This really doesn't seem all that effective (especially on emc) seeing as a "factory" (ie smelting items) won't increase the value of the items too much (and in some cases not at all). I think the smarter way to do things would be to just automate farms or hire workers.
I really think that if this was a viable alternative to the "Small Business" system that currently dominated, we would have seen it already. Acquiring the goods in question is way, way more valuable than processing them... Coal is cheap. And we already have pretty massive gaps in wealth. There are a handful of players with millions of rupees, and I, on the other hand (being overly scatterbrained) could have all of my possessions and my soul bought by them multiple times over. This doesn't really affect the EMC economy that much (I suspect) because investing and lending aren't widely practiced.
I don't really see this as extremely groundbreaking. It is ingenious to exchange raw materials for processed ones, but that's kind of what we do already, manually. I'm thinking eventually on setting up a redstone system that automatically trades items, with only the customer using it. And even that isn't a huge leap in any economic way, even if I hooked it up to a factory But I appreciate your thoughts
This is kind of similar to my foundry on 7304. raw materials go in, automatically smelted and processed goods come out! im just working on the automation of transporting said goods across my res to my shop area.
It doesn't take long to smelt items all at once in a bunch of furnaces, and you get to keep the XP. Even though I know I can do it faster, say it takes 30 seconds per stack. For every extra hour you spend on such a contraption, you could have 120 stacks smelted, and keep the XP! Even if you could automate crafting, that too doesn't take much time. The real value is the raw resources and having a large enough reserve of what you need to construct finished products that customers want.
Or an even BETTER enterprise, the lazy-person enterprise. What is the lazy-person enterprise you might ask. Glad you asked I'll tell you for FREE. What you do is vote a ton to get a crazy amount of rupees. You use those rupees to only buy stuff that will go up in value eg. mostly minerals and promos. "Well how do I know what will go up in value Sir Sloth?" Well I'll tell Mister Mirr0rr. What you do is find an item that is either finite eg. diamonds, lapis and all promos, and buy a LOT of it for a nice cheap price. You then hold on to it waiting to resell for a slight profit per item you bought. Or you find an item that is infinite but is either undervalued, hard to get, or in high demand, eg. emeralds are undervalued, lapis is hard to get, wither farms and paper seems to be in demand atm. Emeralds are undervalued because there are a lot of richer players now and rich players dont like doing work most of the time especially boring work like trading with villagers. You can also just trade emeralds into glowstone or xp bottles and 2-3x returns on it. Lapis is hard to get because again theres more rich players on emc and rich players dont like to do work. Anything really can be in high demand for short time periods. I remember when a DC of player heads went for over 50k just because it was a new thing that people didnt think about collecting or auctioning. But then as more people auctioned DC's of player heads, they were going for less and less. Then when you have made a good amount of rupees from that you buy a really good afk farm (I suggest gold) and just afk the days away getting rupees from selling whatever you got from the farm you bought.
The best AFK farm is a shop that stocks itself. You don't even have to be online and it works. But people tend to price low and/or get greedy with their margins and that makes for a lot of work restocking everything.
False, best afk farm is a casino (I have one, 1577 on smp1) because you deal in "the rupee trade" and rupees are really easy to get by voting. Shops get more attention but you have to have physical wealth to fully operate a good shop where as with a casino you just have to make sure all your machines are good and have a decent amount of rupees in your account so if someone wins they can actual turn in their profits. From me partially owning a mall on smp8 (17000) I make about 2k a week from it (not including selling promos there which I stopped) From owning a casino on smp1 (1577) for about 3 months now I have made around 300k (including donations) and given out like 150k from it. So Im raking in 100k a month and putting out 50k a month from the casino. With the shop I buy and sell to keep everything in stock so my profits are limited (but still there)
Aka have wealth. If you make 300k and give out 150k, you really make 150k. If it takes you 3 months to do that in, you really made 12.5k/week. There are a lot of details missing from this assessment of a single casino versus shop scenario, including how much of the mall you owned, your pricing strategy, etc... Also, didn't you have to refill the prizes in your casino, so is it not in fact, taking up your time? Let's take 2000 as another example of a mall. Todd left for about 4-5 months and did absolutely nothing on EMC at all anywhere and returned with 10 million rupees. That means he made 500k/week without saying or doing anything. Perhaps that's an extreme example, but at least now you see the issue with comparing a single case of something with a single case of something else, and you can see how a shop could be more successful than your casino.
Although auto stocking shops are a great way to make money, I'm going to agree with mirr0rr and say that casinos are way, way more profitable, simply because you are cutting out the raw materials involved, raising your margins... Experience will always have better margins than shops, so if you put a lot of time and effort into the build, amd market it well, I feel as if the casino's likelihood of success is much higher.
I keep at the very least 30k in this account and thats just like 2 weeks of voting rewards xD To maintain the machines all I have to do is take the signed books from the winners chest (where the winners sell the books for profit) and put them in the dispenser while making sure there is at least 9 dirt in all the other slots (7-8 slots need to be filled with dirt) oh and put up to 31 dirt in the hopper that goes into the chest where people initiate the gambling. With the mall I co-own, I have 50% of the floors and skunyspliff has the other 50%. My floors are Wood Items (get a decent amount of people shopping here), Enchanted Books and Tools(used to get like 5k a week from here but took down the tools and moved them to 2000), Tools Weapons and Armor (not much activity here), Chicken Eggs (selling 64 eggs for 1r each so not a lot of rupees a week xD), Nether/End (still filling everything but I get a small amount of shoppers here mostly for blaze rods), And Me and skuny split the ores and ingots floor (I have most of it he just has the iron and iron ingots I think) (about 30% of what i get from 17000 is from this floor). The whole shops pricing is based on the B= Median between B&S at 2000 and S= approximately 70% of B price. With some items we get a lot of We sell it for a lot less than 2000 eg: eggs and blaze rods. 2000 of course is WAY more successful than my casino or shop. My casino isn't even that successful imo. My argument was simply that with a casino, you're not really selling anything except the possibility that someone will leave while they're ahead and they almost never do Theres no supply that players demand, just a little thing for fun and the potential of growing their rupee balance. Remember, The house ALWAYS wins ;P Also with Todd (not sure where you got your sources) but before he took a break he had 12mil rupees (according to his sig with I semi-helped him create by holding onto the excess rupees he had before taking the pic) So if he now has 10mil (assuming he wasnt buying a lot of crap before taking the break) he would have spent 2mil buying items from players.
